Disruptive Telephony

 One of the many cool things I've been hoping to find the cycles to write about coming out of Mitel Forum last week is the collaboration occurring between Mitel and Sun Microsystems.  First announced June 19th, there are really two components to the collaboration: 1) the Multi-Instance Call Server (MICS) that can have up to 200 instances of our 3300 ICP call control software running on a Sun server; and 2) a very cool integration of a SunRay thin client computer into the base of one of our phones.  With the phones, a user can simply insert their "Java card" into the base of the phone and the user is automagically signed onto the computer and to the phone.  Pull the card out, the user is logged out.  Insert another user's card and the computer and the phone are logged in as that user.  It takes the "hot desking" we've had for years and extends that to now also include the PC.  As I said, it's very cool!

The good news is that I can actually share a bit of the experience with you courtesy of Sun blogger Craig Bender, a.k.a. the "Thin Guy", who writes the Sun Ray Blog.  I didn't realize he was at our show, which is a bummer because it would have been great to meet, but he posted this video to YouTube:

You can see my colleague Stephen Beamish demonstrating the capabilities at the Sun booth at Mitel Forum.  Craig did a nice job editing the video and it's great to see it up on YouTube.